Hari Kunzru, 42, is a British Indian novelist and journalist living in New York. His most recent novel was last year'sGods Without Men

As the results of the 2008 presidential election came in, I was in Harlem, standing at the intersection of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jnr Boulevard, part of a huge, emotional crowd. I still feel privileged to have been there. I've never been hugged by so many strangers or seen so many people crying in public. Mothers held their infants up to the giant screen as images of the new first family were broadcast to the world. On that night questions of policy were suspended. It was about those family images – a united black couple and their two beautiful daughters, smiling and waving, living refutations of all the stereotypes, proof that African-Americans had come through their terrible history unbroken and unbowed.

It seems like a long time ago.

Clearly, the last four years of watermelon jokes, chair-lynchings and birther paranoia have demonstrated that American racism is alive and well. However, the current liberal narrative – of a president whose desire to transform the nation has been blocked by rightwing intransigence – seems partially true, at best. Despite all the electoral rhetoric about hope and change, Obama campaigned as a pragmatic centrist who would broadly accept the fiscal terms set by the outgoing Bush administration. Arguably, that's the only way he could have been elected, given that any hint of redistribution is politically toxic here, at least to the deep-pocketed political donors who call the shots. Even before the Supreme Court's shameful decision to allow casino magnates to buy themselves their own pet presidential candidates, American politics was rigged in favour of the wealthy. Obama never had a hope of changing that, and anyone who thought he was going to try wasn't really paying attention.

More genuinely disappointing (at least to those of us who fondly daydream about Dick Cheney in the dock at the Hague) is Obama's failure to reverse the Bush gang's post-9/11 suspension of laws and norms regarding surveillance, detention without trial and extra-judicial murder. The metastasisation of the US security state is (along with lack of action on climate change) the single greatest political disaster of the early 21st century, not just for American citizens, who are discovering that their cherished constitutional rights count for little in the new permanent state of emergency, but for the rest of us, whose rights (and lives) have no value in the calculations of a security establishment that has broken free of all political, financial and moral restraint.

On the plus side, I suppose there's healthcare. It's hard for anyone who grew up with the NHS to see Obama's reforms as anything but a muddled compromise but faced with the prospect of a Romney–Ryan administration (suggested campaign slogan: "Man is a wolf to man"), the president's attempt to provide some kind of safety net appears both heroic and fragile, a relic of a gentler time when a belief in mutual aid was laudable instead of a girly-man weakness, and Ayn Rand was just a bad novelist who used to hang out with Alan Greenspan.